Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

  • Hacker News
  • I've emailed HN's mods requesting Twitter/X links be site-banned as hard-paywalled, given that Nitter and XCancel had also just received C&Ds (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283>).
  • I too dislike logging into Twitter/X, but that's not a paywall, the accounts are still free, no?
  • It can still by bypassed with working nitter instances. Nitter doesn't have to be legal. Archive.today certainly isn't.
  • Related discussion and predictions (2 days ago):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449576

  • Seemed worth a new post, now that they actually killed it today :(

    Is there any frontend still standing?

  • This was obviously going to happen once Nitter got an immediate C&D.

    It just means that it will happen to these alternatives as well and the lawyers have all the money from X Corp to do just that.

    These open source projects circumventing X for free, unfortunately have zero chance in fighting these legal takedowns.

    by rvz
  • Meanwhlie Grok and other AI bro bots non-consensually scrape everything.
  • Hoping we'll see more resilient development/hosting emerge
  • X usage is declining and somebody is desperate to get some metrics up. https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0289n8t&date=toda...
  • All the AI sheep are still using it, just like the webdev sheep before that.
  • For HN, does that mean we should no longer be using X links, since most can't view them?
  • Same category and policy as paywalled news sites.
  • Yes, and yes.
  • Content from X worth sharing is rare anyway.

    I'm not any authority here, but I'd say, there's no need for a Reddit-moment to ban it entirely.

    Though it wouldn't bother me either.

    Directly linked single text posts are still publicly accessible last I checked, but it's a microblogging platform littered with spam.

    HN submissions are usually long-form content, so it's rare to see X links anyway.

    And comments obey the voting system, so who cares whether people link to X, LinkedIn, Facebook or whatever else.

    Banning X in comments would require to ban the others as well, and I think the mods and users can handle by themselves what is relevant in that case.

    And in case an X submission is genuinely interesting, it won't be hard to access or infer the content from the comments or other sources.